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I have a website which ranks in 7th or 8th page in google.co.uk for a competitive term. But the same site can not be found anywhere with the google UK filter on. My domain has co.uk extension and is hosted in the UK.

Is this some sort of a Google penalty? If so, then how do i get out of it? Thanks in advance.

If you haven't done so already, it might be worth double checking with the hosting company that the server is actually physically located in the UK. Or perhaps do a bit of detective work on it's IP address.

Have you also tried using the "set geographic target" feature in Google Webmaster Tools?

Bones and Steve, I have tried every single solution you have mentioned. That is why i am perplexed at the result. I tend to think it to be kind of a Google filter (glitch?) but can not figure out what or why.

The same thing has happened to us but not so drastically. We are no longer front page in the UK but are in the US, Australasia, South America and (oddly) non English countries like Germany and Netherlands.

We are a UK company and our market is the UK.

Right now, I'm getting sales enquiries I can't do anything with but none from the UK.

The change happened about 3 weeks ago, maybe a bit longer.

I don't think we have any kind of penalty, because why would we be served up like this (in position 2) in important markets like the United States if there is a penalty?

Like you, our IP address is UK and we show-up in 'pages from the UK' searches.

My take is this: we don't have enough links from the UK. We're in the tech field and have links from all over. Where we've got good links from (like the US) we rank well

Hadn't thought of specifically UK links helping a .co.uk in PFUK rankings but it sort of makes sense, on G.ie a site with few Irish links and with pages ranked down to 9 in PFI will still be the first Irish result shown in "web search".

We've got a thread about this: Google Adds Sitelinks for a New Batch of Websites [webmasterworld.com] this past week. One report even even sees Sitelinks on the SERPs but not yet in Webmaster Tools, so I'm not surprised to hear that it's no rolled out to google.co.uk at this time.